DRUGS AND (UN)HEALTHY FOOD IN THE CONTEXT OF NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY

Abstract

This conceptual study proposes a problematization on the concepts of drugs and food, without the pretension of exhausting the theme or defining the relationship whose boundaries prove to be porous and flexible. We present a panorama of facts that demonstrate the variety of actors and discursive elements involved in the social construction of these concepts, as well as we wish to stimulate future studies that could guarantee the consolidation of an epistemological approach on this still imprecise relationship.  Our analysis point to the impossibility of governing a simplification of the concepts and show the arbitrarily imprecise associations built under the positivist-biologicist bias of modern medicine and science - supposedly free of political and economic interests - and the neoliberal governmentality treated by a foucaultiana analyses as a set of institutions, procedures, reflections, calculations and tactics that enabled a type of power exercise that has the population as its target; political economy as the main way of knowing; and the safety device as its most basic technical instrument. In this sense, the article proposes considerations about the imprecision in the attribution of the drug and food condition, considering that both were historically instrumented in an indefinite way, varying according to the conjunctures and interests that cross those conceptual constraints that now qualify a certain product - as a result of qualifying strategies - as food, or disqualify it by treating it as drugs - precisely because of its supposed damages caused to human and / or environmental health.